Thomas Garret

Thomas Gerard (1500?–1540) (Gerrard, also Garret or Garrard) was an English Protestant reformer. In 1540, he was burnt to death for heresy, along with William Jerome and Robert Barnes.

He matriculated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, on 9 August 1517, graduating B.A. in June 1518, and M.A. in March 1524. Some time during his residence at Oxford he moved to Christ Church (then called Cardinal College), and also went to Cambridge, where he took his B.D. and D.D.

Gerrard was one of the first English Protestants, distributing Lutheran books. In December 1525 Erasmus begs his commendations to him among other ‘booksellers.’ In 1526 he became curate to his friend Robert Forman, rector of All Hallows, Honey Lane; but John Foxe says that he was at Oxford at Easter 1527, and had been there since Christmas 1526, selling Latin books and William Tyndall's translation of the New Testament to the scholars. He had also distributed books at Cambridge.

Foxe says that he had intended to take a curacy in Dorset under a false name, but gave up the plan, and was at Reading some time in 1527, selling many of his books to the prior there. By Christmas, however, he was again hiding at Oxford, until in the middle of February 1528 he was seized by the commissary. He escaped by the help of a friend, but was again captured at Bedminster, near Bristol, on 29 February, and taken to the Somerset county gaol at Ilchester. After an examination on 9 March he was sent to London, examined before the Bishop of Lincoln and the Lord Privy Seal, and afterwards forced to recant before them and the bishops of London (Cuthbert Tunstall) and Bath and Wells. Lincoln complained (1 April) to Thomas Wolsey that Gerard is ‘a very subtyll, crafty, soleyn, and untrue man,’ as his answers differ from the scholars. Foxe gives a detailed account of this capture under a wrong date (1527).

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